"President Lincoln freed the slaves," was the simple declarative sentence heard in elementary school. True up to a point, but with some qualifiers. For one thing, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, while declaring slavery non-existent, left a glaring loophole.
"Except as a punishment for a crime," it goes on to say, and that's why men—mostly Black men—were often arrested, charged, convicted, and put on chain gangs in the South, and otherwise put to work elsewhere.
OregonSenator Jeff Merkley recently introduced a bill to remove the "except" from the amendment. The move is celebrated by Dream Corps and the Anti Recidivism Coalition.
We get Sen. Merkley's remarks, plus reactions from Nisha Anand at Dream Corps and Esteban Nunez at the Anti-Recividism Coalition.